The Appaloosa. 1966. USA. Directed by Sidney J. Furie. Screenplay by James Bridges, Roland Kibbee, based on the novel by Robert MacLeod. With Marlon Brando, John Saxon, Anjanette Comer, Emilio Fernández, Frank Silvera. DCP. 99 min.
Sidney J. Furie came to this project a year after The Ipcress File and brought with him that film’s taste for oblique compositions and unsettling close-up work, which here pushes the conventions of the border Western into something stranger and more abrasive. Marlon Brando plays Matt Fletcher, a Mexican American buffalo hunter who has come home to raise horses and instead finds himself in a slow, escalating power struggle with bandit chieftain Chuy Medina (John Saxon) over an Appaloosa stallion. Shot in rich Techniscope, the Mexican locations are pressed into wide-screen compositions that crowd Brando’s already closed-off face farther toward the edge of the frame.
The film’s reputation has always been tangled up with stories of its difficult production (Brando’s hostility toward Furie, the director’s compensating visual aggression), and there’s something to that. But the tension finds its way into the film’s best scenes, including the mano a mano sequences between Brando and Saxon that build with the logic of a chess match played under extreme duress. Saxon, nominated for a Golden Globe for his performance, is all surface charm and lizard patience. Brando operates differently, working through stillness until stillness is no longer an option.